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William Thompson
c. 1785–1833
An Irish precursor of Karl Marx may seem
an historical anomaly, but William Thompson, a wealthy landowner and apostle of
social justice, was just such an anomaly.
According to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the British socialists, Marx was
'Thompson's disciple'. At one time,
before the fall of communism, a bust of William Thompson was among the items
displayed at the
Perhaps
the first Irish economist, William Thompson was born in
He
was now a man of property himself.
However, the social conditions of his own tenants, and the population of
Thompson
was atheist. From his travels in
On
inheriting the estate he gave his tenants long leases and began to work for the
improvement of the land and his tenants' lives.
He neither smoked nor drank, and by the end of his life had become a
vegetarian. 'I am not what is usually called a labourer,' he remarked. 'Under equitable social arrangements,
possessed of health and strength, I ought to blush in making this declaration.'
After
studying the writings of Jeremy Bentham, he became an
enthusiast for utilitarianism and socialism.
He became an intimate friend of Bentham. He also supported the cooperative community
which the Scottish pioneer Robert Owen had established at New Lanark.
Thompson
made his own mark as a writer, making important contributions to early
socialist thought, anticipating the theory of surplus value which Marx was to
later expound at length in Das Kapital.
'It
is this exposition of the social right of the worker to the full product of his
labour,' writes the Irish economist Dr Patrick Lynch, 'that makes Thompson the
founder of "scientific" socialism and the most important forerunner
of Karl Marx.' Marx, of course, was far
wider ranging in his study of economics than Thompson, and there is only one
specific reference to Thompson in Das Kapital. But his
ideas are there.
Thompson
was also a pioneer in the advocacy of equal rights for women. His most important book was An Inquiry Into the Principals of the Distribution of Wealth, Most
Conductive to Human Happiness: Applied to the Newly-Proposed System of
Voluntary Equality of Wealth, published in 1824. He considered unearned income from rents and
stocks, as well as private property, as leading inexorably to social
injustice. He saw the just distribution
of wealth as the key to political economy and the advance of social progress.
His
friend Robert Owen had based his appeal for social justice on the rich. Thompson realized that if the working class
was to move forward, it must rely on its own efforts. Again, in his assessment of the influence of
the economic environment on the shaping of political attitudes, he was
certainly a most important pioneer in socialist thought. But he did not believe in state intervention;
what he had seen of it in
A
visit by Robert Owen to
In
these projects he had the assistance of Anna Wheeler, the daughter of an
Anglican archbishop and the granddaughter of Henry Gratton. With her help he had written his Appeal of
One-half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half,
Men, to Retain Them in Political and Then in Civil and Domestic Slavery.
He
died at Cloonkeen, Rosscarbery,
in
What
became of his remains is now a mystery, though the doctor who exhumed the body said
that the bones had been sent to Anna Wheeler 'as a memento of love'. When the will was read, the nephew was
astonished to find that he and the family had been left nothing. William
Thompson had left his estate to the benefit of the poor, to be run along the
lines of New Lanark and according to the principles of Robert Owen. But after a quarter of a century of legal
litigation, this will was set aside.
Naturally, the lawyers profited the most.
The
memory of William Thompson the man has faded.
As Dr Patrick Lynch pointed out, 'His place in international socialist
thought, and in the social democratic tradition in